I spend waaaaaaaaaay too much time waiting for movies to begin for Twitter et al to ever hold my interest. I bring a book. This one’s built around social media tributes to A Bourdain. Two pages in and it’s already good. Perfect bite sized bits for our pre movie time. “Crawl” will go down easier if there’s a cabin cuisine episode with gator bites it.
Set in Florida, filmed in…Serbia?
WTHell?
We take gators SERIOUSLY here in the sunshine and surviving gator mating season (they travel a lot, turn up in unexpected places) state.
And Paramount opened this in…Australia first? More of a “crocodile” country, amIright?
In the Golden Age classic “Sullivan’s Travels,” a snobbish director of fluffy Hollwood comedies (Joel McCrea) learns the value of what he does, and does best, and accepts it after going out among the people.
In “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan,” Mr. Spock (Nimoy, of course) reminds Admiral Kirk (@WilliamShatner) that being a starship captain “was your first, best destiny.”
I’ve seen mediocre movies with Laura Marano and Noah Centineo this week — “Saving Zoë” for her, “Swiped” for him. So I needed to catch up with their April Netflix release “The Perfect Date” to remember why they keep getting work and, what their paired “first best destiny” is.
They’re great at “meeting cute.” They do the sparkling banter thing well, as when her character, rich snarky girl Celia, insults working-class Brooks about his “services” pertaining to his new “The Stand In” app. He’s paid to be “your ideal date.”
“Celia!”
“Gigolo!”
Romantic comedies are their destiny, and this one, as obvious as it is, is a showcase for their gifts to the cinema.
Centineo, of “SPF-18” and “Sierra Burgess is a Loser,” gets to turn on the offhand charm as the dreamy dreamer Brooks, a Bridgeport teen with hopes of a future enrolled at Yale. Marano, of TV’s “Girl Meets World,” gets to play smart, snappish, hard-to-get but hard to resist.
They are damned adorable together.
So it doesn’t matter that he gets his notion to have his gay BFF (Odiseas Georgiadis, cute in the part) whip up an app for being professionally charming after escorting Celia, the cousin of a rich douche of a classmate, to her private school dance.
Doesn’t matter that he is instantly smitten by her gorgeous classmate (Camila Mendes, on the nose) at that dance, and that Celia professes an interest in another boy in her school.
They can bicker a bit, and she can brush him off after he’s fulfilled his duties.
“Do not try to define her, Brooks,” her amusingly indulgent father (Joe Chrest, delightful) counsels. “It will mess up your early ’40s.”
We KNOW they’re going to end up together. The trick is inventing enough amusing obstacles to that eventuality. “Perfect Date” does. Barely.
Director Chris Nelson cooks up a lively montage of “The Stand In” app dates — a coed who needs someone to take her to an art show (he bones up on art), a woman in need of a doubles partner for a “couples” tennis tourney, a girl who wants him to play the heel so her REAL boyfriend will look good by comparison to her parents, etc.
And screenwriter Steve Bloom populates this world with characters who have just a hint of wit, or inspire it in our leads, as when Brooks’ dad (Matt Walsh) pushes the University of Connecticut over Yale.
“Dad, UConn is like the girl down the street who eats food in bed, and smells like it
Movies like this make one wonder if Netflix has found an algorithm that makes them pay off. Their track record with youth rom-coms and sex-comedies (this is the former, decidedly PG with a smattering of profanity) is stellar.
The setting and realization of this world –Bridgeport vs. tony Greenwich, the BMW i8 that Brooks is loaned to take rich girl Celia to the dance, his “uniform” of Navy blue blazer, khakis, white shirt and blue tie — is spot on.
And the banter clicks. This new app, this “full bespoke escort service” in which Brooks promises to be exactly as talkative or silent, solicitous or rude as the woman hiring him desires?
“Think of it as Grubhub. Only instead of ordering Phad Thai, they’ll be ordering you! You’re a hooker, now. Guess that makes me your pimp. High tech.”
That’s all you really want in a rom-com, and maybe a little mushy feeling in the finale.
“Perfect Date” is a perfectly acceptable entry in the genre.
MPAA Rating: TV-14
Cast: Noah Centineo, Laura Marano, Camilla Mendes, Matt Walsh, Carrie Lazar, Odiseas Georgiadis
Credits: Directed by Chris Nelson, script by Steve Bloom. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:30
“Swiped” is about just what you think it is.
And if you thought it was impossible to make what is essentially a PG movie about “hook up” apps like Tinder/Grindr, you weren’t far off.
It’s an airless comedy about a college coding savant Winklevossed into creating a mating, “not a dating app” — for anonymous hook-ups.
A few of the usual Netflix suspects (Noah Centineo of “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” and “The Perfect Date”) are here, with Kristen Johnson of “Third Rock” and veteran funny/handsomeman George Hamilton (and wife Alana Stewart).
And the movie’s not about ANY of them. Writer-director Ann Deborah Fishman (“Marriage Material”) hangs her college copulation comedy on Kendall Ryan Sanders, who was good in “The Best of Enemies,” but is out of his comic depth wrangling this movie version of Sheldon Cooper into somebody funny.
James Singer (Sanders) is obsessed with this online “disruption” guru, and computers in general, and starting college at the only school divorced Mom (Leigh-Allyn Baker) and profligate, womanizing Dad (Steve Daron) could afford.
No, MIT isn’t in the Palm Beach area of Florida, the film’s location.
His new roomie, Lance (Centineo) is high priest of hook-ups, and utterly dismissive of James, until he and his not-in-a-frat bros (Christian Hutcherson, Nathan Gamble) share Professor Barnes’ (Johnson) computer class.
Lance’s callous attitude towards the fairer sex seems to be the rule on this campus.
“Why would I waste money on a movie, or flowers? That went out with the 20th century…The market is saturated with single, slutty girls. It’s a buyers’ market.”
But to Lance, the best hook up app “Hasn’t been created yet.”
“It would have to make it so a girl couldn’t find me afterward.”
James thus is tasked with developing “Jungle,” a narcoleptic dating app for a “woke” age.
Phones, as Wesley (Hutcherson) cruelly tells the fair and seemingly innocent Hannah (Shelby Wulfert) are now “a 24 hour portal to all the sex I could ever dream about. All I have to do is click.” Hannah’s “What’s your last name?” and Jane Austen-fixation of “dating” makes her “obsolete.”
Naturally, Hannah is James’ high school crush. But he keeps on developing “Jungle,” getting it up and operational, turning the tables on bully Lance by making him wait on him hand and foot as he does.
Guys, and a few more girls than you’d like, fall right into “Jungle.” Until the “no dating” part of the fine print hits them. No phone calls, no social niceties, no courting. Just lots of tears.
“Guys nowadays don’t date you,” one dismayed “conquest” notes. “They just sleep with you.”
James has his big change of heart when his sweet, lonely mother tells him and his bratty/pretty sister (Kalani Hilliker) she’s trying out this hot new app (which James takes no credit for).
“Don’t worry, honey. EVERYbody’s doing it!”
Sitcom vet Johnson takes a few shots at interjecting cute lines in her classroom scenes. Lipstick smudged lips on Lance?
“Wipe that girl off your face, please.”
That’s almost a laugh, and it’d be the only one here.
A promising direction are the “first love, love of my life” chats with Grandpa (Hamilton), James polling and questioning people of Grandpa’s generation about dating and sex habits when they were younger.
Fishman can wring anything funny, deep or touching out of those.
The language of “Swiped” — it is named for the screen swipe you use on dating apps to eliminate candidates, or “choose” someone to see — is shockingly tame, considering the subject matter. the “love story” is about as romantic and convincing as the one involving the original version of Sheldon Cooper on TV.
Only Baker, playing a woman-of-a-certain-age getting treated like dirt on a “Jungle” date, manages any pathos.
As Netflix is making a name for itself with naughty rom-coms/sex-coms for teens, their acquiring “Swiped” is no surprise. What is surprising is how timid, unsexy and seriously unfunny it is. Whatever message about empowering entirely-too-compliant coeds into taking control of dating back from the creeps they’re dealing with may be worthy. It just needed to be in a sharper, funnier, more romantic or more overtly sexual package than this.
MPAA Rating: TV-14
Cast: Noah Centineo, Kristen Johnston, Kendall Ryan Sanders, George Hamilton, Shelby Wulfert, Christian Hutcherson, Nathan Gamble, Leigh-Allyn Baker
Credits: Written and directed by Ann Deborah Fishman. A Netflix/NightDove release.
Running time: 1:33
They didn’t know what a big deal it was going to be. But Disney can be forgiven for knowing what it now has in “The Lion King,” 25 years after the animated classic came out, 22 years after the stage version became a Broadway sensation.
Thus, their “live action” (just as animated), pretty much note-for-note remake is more an event than a mere movie.
Stately, with beautifully-rendered digital animals on a gorgeous, largely digitized version of the African veldt, it may not cover much that we’d call new ground. It just covers it at a more regal pace.
Yes, the Donald Glover/Beyonce/Billy Eichner/Chiwetel Ejiofor/James Earl Jones version is a half an hour longer than the 1994 Matthew Broderick/Moira Kelly/Nathan Lane/Jeremy Irons/James Earl Jones original.
There’s a more elaborate “Wimoweh” (“The Lion Sleeps Tonight”) production number, and a lot more shots of (digital) nature piling on minutes.
Just, don’t let this get around among any huzzahs this King of the Movie Beasts piles up, but it is SLOW. Pretty, but slow.
Some characters have been given more to say and do, thanks to the stars taking on the voice-acting roles. To that end, Billy Eichner, taking over for Nathan Lane as Timon the meerkat, and John Oliver, replacing Rowan Atkinson as Zazu the Hornbill (bird) riff and wisecrack to beat the band.
Eichner shows off a not-unpleasant singing voice, and like Oliver, makes the character his own despite the fact he had MUCH bigger vocal shoes to fill.
“How are you? In as few words as possible?”
Classic “Billy on the street.
You’ll recognize Keegan-Michael Key as a comically (sort of) villainous hyena, but not Florence Kasumba, who is no hyena-queen substitute for Whoopi Goldberg.
Donald Glover and Beyoncé are more interesting as singers (“Can You Feel the Love Tonight”) than voice actors and Ejiofor (“Twelve Years a Slave”) is menacing enough, but not on Jeremy Iron’s level for vulpine, venomous villainy as Scar, the murderous brother and pretender to the throne of Pride Rock.
Is there any point reprising the plot, burned into generations thanks to the classic film this is remaking? Cub Simba is born to the Lion King Mufasa (James Earl Jones), is tricked into getting his dad killed by the villainous Scar, and runs off into exile where he meets two Native nihilists, Timon the meerkat and Pumba the warthog (Seth Rogen, whose singing is buried in the score, replacing Ernie Sabella).
Scar, meanwhile, with hyenas as his henchwomen and henchmen, takes over the pride. “The Circle of Life” is broken via greed, environmental degradation and cruelty.
Simba the cub must grow up and fulfill his destiny.
One big change, the meaning of “Hakuna Matata” has changed. It’s not just “no worries,” it’s “Who cares? Not my problem. Existence is fleeting.”
As Timon, “the brains of this operation” explains, there is no “Circle of Life,” just a “meaningless line of indifference.”
Very nihilist. Very 2019.
Oliver’s Kazu, promoted to giving the savanna “news” to the females of the pride (Alfre Woodard and Beyoncé are the two easily recognized voices), has plenty of zingers — “I say it again, cheetahs never prosper!”
“King Redux” has just a couple of more laughs than the first Disney cartoon, but being 30 minutes longer, that’s not much of a plus. The original vs. remake comparison is hard to get away from here, but I have to say I was moved just once by this remake — that lovely opening note of African song/chant still thrills.
The readier comparison might be the actual “live action” “Aladdin,” heading towards $1 billion at the box office, and yet an utterly indifferent experience as a movie. There’s little here that one could call “directing,” although Jon Favreau gets that credit. It’s more produced than directed.
And what do productions render? Product. This product will make bank, and how. And as a product, it makes a perfectly passable time-killer as a summer movie, nothing more.
MPAA Rating: PG for sequences of violence and peril, and some thematic elements
Cast: The voices of Donald Glover, Beyonce Knowles, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Alfre Woodard, James Earl Jones, Seth Rogen, Billy Eichner, Florence Kasumba, John Oliver, Keegan-Michael Key
Credits: Directed by Jon Favreau, script by Jeff Nathanson, based on the Walt Disney animated film. Songs by Tim Rice and Elton John, “Wimoweh” by Solomon Linda, Hugo Peretti, Luigi Creatore, George David Weiss, Albert Stanton. A Disney release.
Running time: 1:58
Gravitas Ventures has this horror tale, a whodunit with a supernatural twist.
Somebody killed him. He’s a ghost — sort of — traveling body-to-body in search of a killer.
A great conceit. Creepy looking. Little known names in the cast, Drew Fonteiro among them.
Aug. 9, we’ll see if we have a sleeper here.
A lot of Orson Welles’ ill will in Hollywood started when he tried to angle ex newspaperman, veteran screenwriter and legendary raconteur and drunk Herman Mankiewicz out of a screenwriting credit for Welles’ debut film, “Citizen Kane.”
Welles’ contributions to the script are well-documented to have been far greater, or at least more important, but no matter.
Nobody likes a credit thief. Ask Jason Reitman.
This David Fincher (“Zodiac,” etc.) biopic is now set up at Netflix, and will star Oscar winner Gary Oldman, who has some of Mank’s history in his own background.
Smells like a contender.
A fart joke. But we’ll see…
Aug. 9.
Timothy Spall continues his survey of the great artists of Britain with this character study of L.S. Lowry, who lived with his mother until her death.
With her discouraging his art all the way home. Pity they couldn’t release it Mother’s Day. You know, a little pushback?
Anyway, “Mrs. Lowry & Son” looks melancholy and detailed, a tad like “Mr. Turner,” and opens at August’s end in the UK.
Oh, to be a “liberal” Christian in Oklahoma, where, as the song almost says, “the dogma’s as high as an elephant’s eye,” and because its believers envision a life in the sky.
“American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel” finds isolated outposts there, where courageous preachers can’t help but take the argument that God isn’t a Republican right to its most fervent believers.
Filmmakers Jeanine Butler and Catherine Butler visit a couple of urban congregations in this mostly rural “reddest of red states,” talk to pastors, a theologian, a state representative and others, all in an effort to define what “politics” attach themselves to the founders of Christianity, and how that differs from the Evangelicals who have defined Christianity as a patriarchal, hierarchical “parental and punitive” religion, which it wasn’t as related in the stories of the Bible.
As the film’s theologian, Dr. Bernard Brandon Scott says, quoting Luke 12:57 — “Why do you not judge for yourself what is right?”
The movie is framed by events at one of the most “liberal” congregations in the state, Mayflower Congregational (UCC) Church in Oklahoma City.
When Rev. Robin R. Meyers, who later was the author of “Why the Christian Right is Wrong,” arrived, he ran into trouble right off. Merely referring to the church as “liberal” was verboten.
“Liberal” means “tolerant” and “open minded” to him, he explained to irate congregants. It means “The Hated Other” to much of Fundamentalist America, especially in The Sooner State.
“In Oklahoma, you can be a Democrat, or you can be a Christian,” he jokes that he learned. “But you can’t be both.”
“American Heretics” profiles several folks you might describe as Next Generation Fundamentalists. They’re willing to go back into the historical record, parse the Bible for ways it is out of date (“Slavery was totally OK in the Bible.”) and ways it has been twisted by the schismatic Southern Baptists, still, in their eyes, re-fighting the Civil War in modern America.
“Nobody has the absolute truth,” Rev. Meyers says. “That would be idolatry…If you say you’re certain, then you need no faith.”
Robert P. Jones, author of “The End of White Christian America,” serves up a history of Evangelic political activism, how “17% of the population, 26% of voters in the last election” were energized by the Bob Jones University inter-racial dating ban lawsuit before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1982. Jerry Falwell, who had been sharply critical of preachers using the pulpit for politics when it was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. urging a “march to the ballot box,” dove in head first.
This population is “over-represented at the ballot box” Jones notes, and in state legislatures, where states such as Oklahoma have long standing “chaplain’s opening prayer” policies designed to exclude other religions, and have become even narrower in giving that forum to conservative Evangelicals in many states.
One of the “Heretics” profiled here is Lori Walke, and we see her struggle — she’s a co-pastor at Mayflower and married to a Democratic legislator — to get equal time before Oklahoma’s legislators, where she offers up her prayer for tolerance, help for the underprivileged, urging votes that will create a Biblical “city upon a hill” to people who have cut education and social services funding and stymied efforts to raise the minimum wage.
The most chilling footage in “American Heretics” isn’t still shots from the infamous “Tulsa Race Riots” of 1921, which was actually a white lynch mob that destroyed the city’s black business district and killed many of its residents.
No, after hearing that this is a “family values” state that is at war with families, seeing the capital rotunda, where the names of inhuman giant companies are carved into its walls — Halliburton, Phillips Petroleum, Hobby Lobby Stores — simply hurts the heart, and makes one wonder “WTF, OK?”
Walke, a one-time college basketball player, remembers the day she knew she had to find a new church, hearing a preacher blistering New Orleans by saying Hurricane Katrina was “punishment from God” for the city’s sins.
We hear disgraced former attorney general Jeff Sessions quoting St. Paul that “God has ordained the government for His purposes,” urging obedience to a system that has rendered America’s divide between rich and poor the greatest in its history, see samples of the fire-and-brimstone rage of vintage sermons at the birth of The Moral Majority and the snide, crude jokes of its current leading light, Jerry Falwell Jr.
The natural reaction for most would be despair. What if all of America turns into Oklahoma?
Then Bishop Carlton Pearson of All Souls Unitarian in Tulsa tells his story. He was first lieutenant to Pentecostal populist Oral Roberts, preaching and leading the choir on national telecasts, moving out to his own church but still all but the anointed successor to Roberts.
Roberts, he says, was an “underdog who rooted for the underdog.” Little of this cozying up to the cynical, rich and powerful of the Falwells and Robertsons. Roberts wasn’t determined to be a kingmaker like those two most famous of his peers.
And then we hear how Pearson got into trouble. He dared tell his Tulsa congregation that “Hell does not exist.”
We’ve already heard Dr. Scott takes us back to that hot button issue for Christian fundamentalists, the Emperor Constantine’s Council of Nicaea, where whole books of the then-new Bible were tossed out. The absence of the Book of Mary helped erase centuries of female involvement and leadership — documented in crypt and catacomb painting — from the newly, more patriarchal Church.
Scott has made the case that this council and the “Nicene Creed” that came from it “invented Christianity,” shifting the Jewish teachings of Jesus, a religion of “”praxis,” your belief is what you do, your actions, to a Christianity of “belief” — what you say you believe is what matters.
And as Pearson and Scott point out, the Hell of Fundamentalism, with its fear and retribution, pretty much doesn’t exist in the Bible in any form.
There is a “Politics of the Gospel,” everybody here argues. And it’s not the one that’s holding the stage and the media’s attention via white Evangelical Protestants and their adoration of a “vengeful god figure,” Donald Trump.
That’s a lot of ground to cover in a 90 minute documentary, and “American Heretics” leaves much merely uncovered, not wholly explored. The filmmakers say they reached out to Oral Roberts U. and others for balance, but nobody from the comswrvstove doce took them up on their offer. A few detours turn into blind alleys, though the sermons and music served up here are uplifting and entertaining.
An interesting device is using the debate in Mayflower over whether to become a “sanctuary church” for immigrants to frame the last half of “Heretics.”
The Butlers’ film deserves a place in the growing national conversation about what has happened in America with the cultish connection between white Evangelicals and the most godless person ever to hold high office in the U.S., the damage they’re doing to society, the economy, the environment and their own faith with their slavish desire to simply “own the libs” via their embrace or tolerance of treachery, bigotry, intimidation and treason.
“American Heretics” shines a light on those who would be a candle in the midst of the Medieval darkness of modern, white Southern American Christianity.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Credits: Directed by Jeanine Butler, Catherine Butler.
An Abramorama release
Running time: 1:27
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